This Life of Mine (Nonfiction)

Enemy of My Enemy

                                                        “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

            People like to reminisce. They like to remember how they met, to retell the story to other people, to relive that moment of awkwardness and discovery and newness. But I rarely remember the stories of how I’ve met people; apparently it’s an offensive quality.

        It’s not that I don’t care. The problem is that I only make the effort to move moments into long-term memory when the moment is valuable, when the people are important to me. New relationships, new friendships are too unpredictable; there’s too much possibility for the interaction to be a one-time thing, for my effort to remember to be wasted. Why waste brain-space with remembering where and when and how I’ve met all of these various people if they aren’t going to be in my life for more than a moment, a day, a semester? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

        But here’s the thing. Some people do stick around, some become really great friends. And when they do, there’s the awkward moment when you’re hanging out with a group of friends, when everyone is telling stories about each other, when everyone is laughing and smiling and remembering the best moments in their friendships, and your friend turns to you and begins: “Do you remember that day when we met?”

        My first thought is always: “Oh God. I’ve got nothing.” I mean, come on. I didn’t know when I met this person that she would be worth my time. It’s an honest mistake, really, in the name of efficiency and hypothalamus preservation.

        But something about the day I met my best friend Jenny was different. She made quite the impression.

            My university requires a lovely freshman seminar—very beneficial and helpful, obviously—called Gateway. It was the bane of my existence at eighteen. Twice a week I would have the pleasure of bonding with people whose commonality with me ended with the fact that we were all freshmen.

            The first day of classes—whether in elementary school or in college—typically consists of “Ice-Breaker” activities which were clearly invented by someone with a sadistic sense of humor who loved to watch people fester in their awkwardness. Gateway was no exception.

            The professor handed out “Get to Know Each Other” Bingo. Essentially, this was a large piece of paper with about sixteen squares on it, each filled with a task intended to force you to get to know something about someone else in the class: find someone with green eyes, find the tallest person in the class, find the smartest person in the class, find someone whose favorite food is eggplant or who had cheerios for breakfast or who is the seventh born of the seventh child or some other arbitrary fact that tells you nothing about the actual person. Once you found them, you had to have them sign the square which applied to them. If you filled the card, you won—the grand prize being recognition as the single most obnoxious person on the planet, at least in my opinion. It would have been quite the accomplishment given the company at the moment.

            “Can you sign any of my squares?”

            I turned to see a girl who was nearly a foot taller than me (not a terrible feat) with long light brown hair. Great, one of those Church-of-God girls, I thought, taking in her long dress with the moderately high neck-line.

        Strike one.

        And she was pretty. Too pretty.

        Strike two.

            “Only if you sign one of mine,” I answered.

            “Which one?” she asked.

            “I don’t care. Whichever one you want,” I said. Apathy at its finest.

            “Tall is always an easy option,” she commented, signing the box for Tallest Person in the Class.

            I looked at the unsigned options on her sheet: Tallest Person in the Class, Smartest Person in the Class, Someone from Michigan, Oldest Child, Someone with a Birthday in June.

            “None of these are true for me,” I said, rolling my eyes at the game.

            “Who cares. Just pick one,” she answered with a chuckle.

            I made a mental note to forgive one of her previous strikes. She had sass.

            “Smartest” seemed like the closest fit, so I signed the box. “I don’t actually think I’m the smartest, but the others were too far from the truth. I mean, I did pretty well in high school and on my SATs and all. But that doesn’t mean I’m the smartest.”

            She laughed. “It does seem like an awfully arrogant box to sign, doesn’t it?”

            “They’re all stupid,” I said, shaking my head as we exchanged our newly signed Bingo sheets.

            “So what’d you make on your SAT?” she asked.

            “1400,” I answered.

            When she didn’t answer, I looked up to find her staring down at me with wide blue eyes. “You’re joking,” she said.

            “Nope. Perfect score in writing, actually. Twice,” I said. “It’s really no big deal.”

            It wasn’t false modesty. It wasn’t a big deal to me. It was what I expected of myself.

            “Seriously? You just don’t look that smart,” she said, her voice high and sharp with shock.

            “Wow, thanks,” I said, my breath huffing out as though offended.

            Was that strike two or three now?

            “Oh God, that didn’t sound right. I just meant that you don’t look like a nerd. I mean, you look normal. I didn’t mean you look stupid or anything,” she stumbled, trying to correct her blunder.

            “Uh, thanks…I think?” I said, laughing at her apologetic eyes and eyebrows scrunched in concern.

            “BINGO!” a girl yelled from the other side of the classroom, throwing her arms up in the air. “BINGO BINGO BINGO!” she said.

            “People like that need a high-five in the face. With a chair,” she said, glaring across the room.

            I snorted and barely controlled my explosion of laughter. “My thoughts exactly.”

            Home run.

            “I’m glad we hate all the same people,” she said. “I’m Jenny.”